Magic mushrooms to the rescue!

[SpankMe]

Seriously, though. Here's a recent article about how the psychoactive ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms was used to treat cancer patients by lessening and eliminating their depression, fear and anxiety of dying or having cancer - in a single treatment.

A small dose of psilocybin with some specialized talk therapy improved the outlook of both terminal and treatable cancer patients. In some cases, dramatically. And in most cases, for a long period of time. And that's on a single treatment event!

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/magic-mushroom-drug-psilocybin-helps-cancer-patients-chill-out-n690741

I heard on NPR a few years ago a TED talk about scientists who were using the same substance to treat PTSD in returning Iraq soldiers. In 8 of 8 cases - it totally worked. All of the subjects eliminated most (or all) symptoms of PTSD. And in one or two of them, lessened the negative impacts to the point where it was further treatable with conventional psychotherapy, and their lives were completely manageable. (I wish I could find this TED event. I've been on Google for a lot of time and still can't track it down.)

Scientists and doctors in these matters are very bullish on the use of psychedelics to treat various disorders. But, so many people OD'd on the stuff in the 60's and 70's, that the government slammed the door on it and stigmatized it. It's been nearly impossible to do research using these psychedelic substances because of the hardcore anti-drug fervor we've been seeing since Reagan.

Now that things a cooling a bit, maybe research on this can be expanded.

[Tanuki]

1. They might come in handy for coping with Inauguration Day.

[WheelWalker]

2. I don't think overdose was the reason the government "slammed the door" on psychedelic substances...

http://www.maps.org/news/bulletin/articles/407-bulletin-spring-2016/6098-psychedelics-and-systems-change-%E2%80%94-spring-2016

In fact, the prohibitionists are correct. The legalization of cannabis, LSD, MDMA, psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, and the other psychedelics would indeed mean the end of society as we know it. The threat that conservative political forces have identified is real. If these were just innocuous bourgeois playthings, “experiences” that one could consume on weekends to make life-as-usual a little more tolerable, then the guardians of the status quo would have little reason to prohibit them. They recognize, if only unconsciously, the revolutionary social and political potential these substances carry.

Psychedelics can bestow expanded consciousness, perceptions, and ways of being that are incompatible with those that undergird our society. Psychedelics have the power to subvert the alienation, competition, anthropocentrism, linear ordering of time and space, standardization of commodities and social roles, and reduction of reality to a collection of things that propel the world-destroying machine of modern civilization. They disrupt the defining mythology of our civilization, the Story of Separation.

The elements of the Story of Separation listed above also embed our economic system, which means that the spread of cannabis and psychedelics could have negative economic effects—that is, when we define economic benefit as the growth in monetized goods and services. They promise less consumption of goods and services, not more. The modern self, alienated from nature and community, has an endless craving to consume and possess, seeking to grow in compensation for the lost infinity of the interconnected, inter-existent, true self that psychedelics help reveal.


Beware, then, of arguments that legalization is good for the economy. It won’t be, but it will accelerate a transition toward a different kind of economy. The psychedelic experience reveals its lineaments: less quantity and more quality, fewer “services” and more relationships, fewer “goods” and more beauty, less competition and more community, less accumulation and more sharing, less work and more play, less extraction and more healing. This is utterly at odds with the present economic system.

[leftyladyfrommo]

3. I wonder if they need volunteers.

That would be a good way to make it through the ne,the however long the Swamp King lasts.

[IcyPeas]

4. cluster headaches too.

won't link an article since there are so many. but the mushrooms seem to make the headaches disappear for a longer time in between than any other drug.